Easy to Understand, Easy to See: Conceptual and Perceptual Fluency Drives News Headline Selection

People generally prefer fluent, or easy, information processing experiences. Consequently, processing fluency often impacts individuals’ judgments and evaluations of information. Previous research found that processing fluency influenced headline selection and recognition. The present experiment replicated and extended this work by testing whether type of fluency, comparing conceptual (language difficulty) and perceptual (figure-to-background contrast) fluency manipulations, impacts selection and recognition of news headlines. Results demonstrated that individuals showed strong preferences for fluent news headlines, across both types of fluency manipulations. However, only the conceptual fluency manipulation impacted recognition, such that easy language was associated with higher recognition.